SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Howard Boone's Zinn

sharecroppers in Fayette County, and made occasional trips to Nashville, where he met Diane Nash and talked with her about the future of SNCC. She had been impressed by him, and so called on him now.

      Forman was just back from Monroe, North Carolina, where he had participated in demonstrations and been badly beaten. In Chicago, he was teaching school and thinking of doing some more writing; Diane Nash, James Bevel and Paul Brooks asked him to come to direct the SNCC office in Atlanta for sixty dollars a week. Forman (strongly built, handsome, with a big shock of curly hair, brown skin, an easy smile, and the features of an Indian) agreed to start working for SNCC in October.

      Thus, in August of 1961, SNCC was ready to move. The sit-ins and Freedom Rides had been successful in the Upper South. They had ground to a bloody halt in the Deep South, leaving the participants wounded but determined, the opposition unsettled, the nation expectant. The excitement of the Rides was still in the atmosphere. The students and ex-students in SNCC had a staff, a new Executive Secretary, and a vague idea of general strategy. Now, with their characteristic instinct for both challenge and danger, they turned towards the state of Mississippi.